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Fruit Fritters

Fruit fritters are batter‑fried fruit pieces coated in flour and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Fruit Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt.

  2. Beat the eggs and combine with the milk.

  3. Add the melted butter to the egg mixture.

  4. Combine the wet and dry ingredients, mixing well.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat lard in a deep kettle to cover the food.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into the hot lard and fry until golden brown on both sides.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the batter together as it fries.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set.
Baking powder
Releases gas that makes the fritters rise and become light.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour in the batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown during frying.

The step that matters

Heat the lard before frying. If the lard is not hot enough, the batter soaks up oil instead of crisping quickly, leaving greasy fritters. Hot fat sets the outside fast so the inside cooks through without absorbing much oil.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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